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Yup, it's another beta hold that got insta-submitted. Third insta-submission for this particular architect. Once again, he pressed the "submit" button immediately after attaching his hold, did not wait for any comments in the architecture thread, and did not even respond to the one helpful beta tester who commented after submission.

There are a few interesting rooms in this hold, especially some of the mimic rooms. This could have been a really nice hold with some beta testing and polishing. However, what the player will notice most is the lack of beta testing.

* There are no checkpoints in this hold.
* There is unexplained scripting in this hold.
* There is confusing and unnecessary scripting in this hold. For example, in two rooms, a scripted yellow door functions as a black sister door.
* There are lots of unintended solutions. The player does not need to push each mirror to the architect's intended spot.
* The level entrance text is still at the default "Entrance 1" "Entrance 2" settings.

Alberttox2, do you realize why your holds are being rated so low? It's because you submit your hold to the holds board before it can be properly tested.

The holds board is not for "beta holds", it's for complete holds. Complete holds are level sets that have come out of beta status. You don't seem to want to do that, and my question is "Why?".

The purpose of the Architecture board is for holds such as these by people such as yourself to be tested and improved. Listen to your testers for they are just as important as the architect.

That being said and done, my rating and notes are this:

3 fun
1.5 brains

Checkpoints were the biggest issue here. I didn't like making a mistake, accidentally make another move after that, and having to restart AGAIN. Another problem was that all the puzzles were just the same thing over and over again - moving mirrors. I suppose the rooms would be more interesting if you were swordless, other sworded monsters moved the mirrors, slayer manipulation by body or by hook, etc.

Push mirrors to designated places (easy, since you have your sword, you can move diagonally, and the layouts are very open). Maybe kill a few penned-in monsters, too. Repeat.

This is a relaxingly mindless hold, which could make it worth a look at the end of a long week if the player can get around the lack of checkpoints. Budding optimizers could also probably use it to practice. Just don't expect too much.

quote:1. Your hold is bad if it is not completable.
2. Your hold is bad if there are backtracking issues, like you can't return to a required room you didn't complete, or there are two required paths, either of which make you unable to get to the other one. Unrequired rooms that are not backtrackable are okay...they're just bad form, and we will let you know about it. Also, secret rooms should be reachable. Otherwise people will get mad at you when they can't master your hold.
3. Your hold is bad if there is #$!@%^@#ing profanity. Unless it's Eighthized. See here for a selection of acceptable Eighth profanities.
4. Your hold is bad if there are copyrighted images, or sounds, or anything that somebody has their copyright on. (Unless it's your copyright.) That's just bad news, and would get us into a whole lot of legal mess and jargon that we just don't want to deal with. Also, we consider rooms in DROD to be copyrighted by their authors. You must obtain permission before putting another architect's room in your hold.
5. Your hold is bad if it's essentially the same as a hold already on the Holds board (even if the older hold is your own, or if you have permission to copy it). By "essentially the same" we mean that the puzzles can be solved by the same solutions. Making an easier/harder version of an existing hold is ok.

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"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

quote:VIPCOOL wrote:
One thing I don't understand is why the HA's never reject holds.

We generally don't make it a habit to make grand announcements of the holds we reject from submission. As such, those holds remain on their private beta boards or in Architecture, without any record of HA to architect talks. Therefore the holds that make it to the holds board are far more memorable.

tl;dr We do reject holds, you just don't hear about them.

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Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

We don't reject holds for subjective reasons. If a hold passes those 5 rules mentioned by Oneiro from the Friendly Note, the hold is on the board.

Were we to do so, I think it would inject more vitriol and confusion into the process. What if one HA thinks the hold is okay enough for the holds board, and another thinks that there's no way it should be there? (2 HA opinions are required for hold approval.) Would our new rule be "I know a bad hold when I see one"?

Yes, the current process allows some subjectively bad holds through the filter. I still think the rating system takes care of this. If people rate poor holds as poor holds, people will generally know they're poor. We make sure that holds are playable, and I think that is an appropriate level of responsibility for the HA. We've got plenty of space for the "don't do this" holds in our Hold Museum.

quote:Onei wrote:
Their job is not to prevent un-fun holds from being published:

I understand this, but I thought there was a difference between a hold being bad, and a hold being rejected. This quote...

Click here to view the secret text

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quote:zex20913 wrote:
We also have the power to flat out reject your hold. This doesn't mean that it will never be able to be promoted, but it does mean that we feel the hold could benefit from more testing and fine-tuning.

...made it sound like unpolished holds shouldn't be published.

I think your confusion on this point is understandable, perhaps because of zex's softening of the language.

However, in general the HAs do not reject holds. Holds that are submitted get 'No' votes if they have problems like the ones listed in the Friendly Note. Some holds have spent a long time in the HA process because they needed a lot of fixing. Usually the only time a hold is outright rejected are:
a) by request of the submitter, or
b) if a sufficiently long time has gone by without the submitter responding to HA requests for changes.

The HA process is interactive (when it has to be). If you submit a hold and go on vacation, you may well find that it's been rejected when you get back (if it had problems that prevented its immediate promotion). Doesn't mean you can't fix it and resubmit it.

But we've always stayed far away from offering any sort of official judgment on whether a hold is good or bad (although, as you can probably tell, we all have opinions). Opinions and hold ratings are offered as private forum citizens. As HAs, we say 'promotable' or 'not promotable'. (We do also offer suggestions if we see non-blocking issues, point out unintended solutions, etc...but that's not a requirement and we don't block hold promotion for spelling, USes, or anything else except what's listed in the Friendly Note.)

Josh

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"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck[Last edited by jbluestein at 09-14-2009 04:58 PM]

I'm afraid people are jumping in on this conversation without checking the history of this particular hold.

"Soco ban sword"was rejected once for the "severe playability issues" reason. The architect was directed to seek more help and feedback in Architecture to deal with the issues. The architect refused to do this and resubmitted the hold with no corrections. The architect was told several times that the hold could be greatly improved by more beta testing, but he did not respond. After a couple weeks of confusing back and forth noncommunication, the hold finally met the minimum criteria for the Holds board. And here you have it.

What I don't understand is this: I warned you guys not to expect much in my very first post in this topic. In spite of that, a bunch of you just had to download it anyway and come to post here about what we already know: the hold is indeed not that great. I really like Tim's advice from another Holds topic. Stop repeating and repeating what you don't like about the not so great holds and go tell us what you do like about the better holds. I wonder if this topic could be on Page 2 by the end of the week?

quote:Odyssey wrote:
To anyone who plays this hold, be prepared to have to use the Build menu to access most of the rooms.

Although you're welcome to hop around in the editor as much as you like, please be assured that all the rooms are accessable and solvable in game.[Last edited by CuriousShyRabbit at 09-19-2009 08:32 PM]

I'm not sure what "unpredictable scripting" is being talked about. Opening a door? Breaking a mirror? Since the purpose of the game is to push mirrors of pressure plates, and breaking one would make this trivial, it didn't seem at all unpredictable that this would make the room unsolvable.

I actually enjoyed this. As said, it's something of a mindless, relaxing hold. Reminds me of Zelda in a tiny way, pushing blocks around. Nothing is very difficult but it could be a challenge to optimize. The lack of checkpoints is probably the most glaring omission. There are a few but not enough to prevent having to restart a long, tedious sequence because of a mistake.

The secret rooms were decently easy to spot and yet fun. Using the clones and mimics were a fun diversion and the last few rooms were pretty good. The difficulty ramped up gently and slowly. All in all, a good hold and probably undeserving of a lot of the negative tenor of the comments, even if he should have had it tested first.

I recently replayed this hold and now I must agree with west.logan. I actually like this hold now, for the reasons he described.

Maybe I am too quick to judge stuff as cat-barf, because I have changed my rating to
4 for fun
2 for brains
35/100 approval rating.
A good, mindless hold for one's coffee break. Some of the secrets here are rather quite fun.

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It was going well until it exploded.~Scott Manley

The main focus of this hold is moving mirrors to specific spots so that pressure plates will activate and kill whatever monster is in the room. While this idea could work for a mini-hold, this hold doesn't execute that idea well.

The puzzles are hardly that interesting. There's no difficulty progression, no change of room idea. Every room is essentially identical with slightly different mirror/pressure plate placements. Just lots of trivial stuff.

Shockingly enough, that isn't the worst problem. The worst problem is the lack of checkpoints. There are only TWO checkpoints in this hold. This hold provides a good reason why we need UU in TSS. While it's not difficult, it's sure annoying to break a mirror, accidentally move something and have to do the whole trivial room...AGAIN. As for optimizing,it is just hell. It's so much hell that I'll be actually replaying it in TSS just so that I can actually improve my scores. You gotta respect the optimizers too, cause they are a fairly large group of players.

As for other issues, you got poor aesthetic design, a lack of level descriptions and hold descriptions/endings. Also, the strange spelling of "socoban", which appears to be a spelling error, and the disparity between "soco ban" in the title, and "socoban" in the level titles.

quote:CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
What I don't understand is this: I warned you guys not to expect much in my very first post in this topic. In spite of that, a bunch of you just had to download it anyway and come to post here about what we already know: the hold is indeed not that great. I really like Tim's advice from another Holds topic. Stop repeating and repeating what you don't like about the not so great holds and go tell us what you do like about the better holds. I wonder if this topic could be on Page 2 by the end of the week?

I find this rather narrow-minded and mean-spirited. The reality is, this hold has a very low difficulty rating. That means getting high-scores for the rooms is fairly straightforward. As "Steve"'s "Conquering the High Score Tables" say, you should "pick some easy holds to play through", because "[t]his will allow you to quickly increase your move count which will gain at least one point per room and give you some valuable experience that will help with the more difficult holds when the time comes". And since there are only a dozen or so good "easy" holds ATM (most of which are tutorials), this is what we get. For the record, I personally passed a person playing through this hold, and I have quite a high ranking.

Instead of blaming everyone else saying "I told you so", you got about two options.

1) Make good easy holds to offset all the bad ones.
2) Petition to change the HA process so bad holds like this don't get promoted.

Not to continue this discussion any further than it needs to go, but CSR's point was that people tend to post a ton of negative criticism that more or less repeats what has been said about the hold. It is perfectly fine to play bad holds, but it gets on my nerves when people go and post that a bad hold is bad when the topic already has 20 or so replies that also say, "I didn't really like this hold,". I'm guilty of the same practice, but I'd like to think I've stopped.

This is not to say you shouldn't review every hold you play, it's just that a post isn't really useful unless you have something new to add (in this case you sort of did, but in some of your other posts you haven't added very much to the thread). It is true that posting about how certain holds are good is reasonable, since the bump helps visibility, but since most people don't go out of their way to play bad holds (highscores typically search by difficulty not quality) it isn't worth posting on all the holds you play.

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If you need to think outside of the box, then you didn't build a good enough box.

Wait, bomber50 is calling CuriousShyRabbit narrow-minded and mean-spirited? CuriousShyRabbit was one of the nicest, most positive, most helpful people to ever grace this forum. I wish for her return every time I'm reminded she was ever here.

Hold of the Year and Technical Design Excellence in Concept Award Winner (2008)Advanced Concepts - I made the Goblins, Fegundos, Eyes and Potions levels
(Tutorials and Challenges involving specific DROD elements)

I have wondered where she went for some time now, and I vaguely remember asking about it in chat and if I recall correctly Schik tried to contact her to no avail. I hope she is alright at least.[Last edited by slimm tom at 06-14-2014 05:03 AM]

Okay, so I played through this. It was fun. But... it's also broken and unfinished in a lot of ways. With a while on the Architecture board it could have been great, but as is... if you like the concept it's interesting to see what's been done, anyway.